


The Letting Go

by zopponde



Series: Remembered If Outlived [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Assumptions, Episode: s14e21 The Triplets, Gen, Past Character Death, Project Freelancer, RvB Angst War, Season/Series 15, implied Ohio/Sherry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-07 00:36:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14069067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zopponde/pseuds/zopponde
Summary: Wash and Carolina go looking for missing Freelancers. They find three signals on a remote, icy planet, and a mystery that's simpler than it seems.





	The Letting Go

**Author's Note:**

> RVB Angst War regulation warnings: Character death, Gore, Suicide. If you care more about warnings than spoilers, a more detailed description is on my Tumblr:  
> http://seerofbread.tumblr.com/post/172178361050/remembered-if-outlived-red-vs-blue
> 
> This is intended to be able to stand alone or function in a diptych with the other work (Recollect the Snow) in the Remembered If Outlived "series." Either one can be read first.

Wash closes the Pelican bay doors when he’s done waving the Reds and Blues onto Dylan’s ship. He walks towards the cockpit, where Carolina is already flipping switches. Lights come on, then a soft hum vibrates through the ship, and then the engines start.

“Where to?” Wash asks.

Carolina glances at him sidelong, and he knows she’s rolling her eyes. “You tell me. I’m not the one with experience tracking down rogue Freelancers.”

“You know I really only tracked down the equipment,” Wash explains, crossing his arms. “The UNSC should have tracked all of that down and gotten it back by now, and anyone who escaped that would be whoever deactivated their trackers.”

“Or they’ve been captured by whoever’s making them go missing,” Carolina says. “I doubt that they could all get their trackers deactivated. Could make for a short search.”

Wash sighs, leans in over the communications console, and starts pressing buttons. “I’ll see if I can rig up the old tracking system.” He doesn’t say that he was usually getting intel from someone else. Deactivating the console, Wash pulls the casing off of it.

Carolina rolls her eyes again. Is this going to be a whole project? “How long’s this going to take?” she asks.

Shrugging, Wash says, “How about this? If I can make the tracker before we hit vacuum, we’ll use it. Otherwise, we’re going to take a peek at these files that the nice journalist left us, telling us where our friends were last seen.” Carolina’s impatience must be wearing off on him. Or maybe Wash is more anxious to find out what happened to his former teammates than he lets on.

“Alright then,” Carolina says, hands hovering over the controls. She gives Wash a second, but instead of sitting down, he crouches on the floor in front of the console, hands deep in the wiring. “You going to buckle up, or do you want to go so slow that Grif comes back and changes his mind?”

For a moment, Wash is tempted by the idea. It feels wrong to leave him here. Carolina wonders at her own joke, remembering that Grif is responsible for most of her precious few laughs. She’ll need to keep her spirits up to get through whatever it’s going to take to find Church, especially if that means facing former Freelancers.

But Wash knows that Grif would be all but useless on this mission, apathetic as he is to everything the Freelancers stand for. And as Wash sits in the passenger seat, Carolina remembers the red translucence of an alien AI, the phantom emotion of seeing every Freelancer die in front of her. How long have they been missing? Some of them have been months, Carolina knows that much from what the reporter said, and when someone is missing that long it usually means they’re dead. Being a super soldier just means you’re less likely to get killed in the first place.

But there’s a chance Carolina could save some of them, or at least get justice, and she can’t wait around for some asshole who isn’t even devoted to the cause. Her squadmates could be dying. Church needs her help

Wash is clinging to the handles, ready to get back into the console when the acceleration steadies, and Carolina punches it.

* * *

 

The rigged tracking device picks up a weak signal. “It’s pretty far out there,” Wash says, uncertain, holding a screen in his lap as he straps into the Pelican’s seat. “It might still be faster to do the files than to go out there and come back.” He doesn’t say that he’s not sure the thing’s even working right. There should be more signals, one way or the other.

“Does it say if they’re dead or alive?” Carolina asks. If they’re alive, she thinks, they’re prisoners. They might be tortured. Carolina has to get them out.

The screen flickers, and Wash shakes it gently. The wires must have been a little loose because the screen comes back strong. Unfortunately, Wash’s confidence in his engineering doesn’t recover. “It’s actually three signals? They’re just so far that it registers as one weak signal. I can’t emphasize it enough, this is really, really far.”

“And their status?” If they’re dead, then any force will be justified. No need to hold back.

“One dead, two alive.”

“Perfect,” Carolina says. “Give me a heading.”

With a sigh, Wash reads the coordinates out. As the numbers come out, realization dawns on both of them that these signals are pretty much at the edge of the known galaxy, and not on the same edge as their moon. “We’ll have to refuel somewhere along the way.” Wash says, tired already. “Did you bring a change of clothes?”

“This is going to take a while no matter how we do it,” Carolina points out. She punches a button and the Pelican enters slipstream space, and once the ship settles into its multidimensional state, Carolina adds, “If you’re that worried for time, you could probably start up on going through those files. We can set up plan B and get on it as fast as you want.”

It’ll definitely change the distance on any of the leads, Wash thinks, but Carolina has a point. He sets the tracking monitor on a bed of tangled wires, hoping it won’t rattle too much. Then Wash unstraps to find a data pad, sits in a random seat in the back so he has space to think, and loads the files that Dylan left with him.

* * *

 

Carolina leans on the door frame leading to the cockpit. They’re approaching the destination, but the autopilot handles slipspace pretty well, and Carolina has to know something in the short time left before they get there. “So,” she starts, like she could ever start a conversation casually, “do you know whose signals you got?”

Wash shakes his head. “That part’s pretty thoroughly scrambled. Couldn’t have the enemy knowing exactly where all our agents are.”

“It’s been almost a day.”

“Yeah, and I’m not an AI,” Wash snaps. It hits a little close to home for either of them. “Look, I don’t even remember how intense the encryption is. I just remember hearing someone describe it and knowing that it was way beyond my pay grade. Maybe like, York could have...”

That’s not much better, and they both know it. If Carolina weren’t so bored, she might sulk back into the cockpit for the rest of the trip. Instead, she probes. “Do you have any guesses?”

Wash hesitates. “Agent Illinois was the closest to this area when he was last seen, and there were two others close enough... it might be him and some others. Assuming it’s all agents who were active when Freelancer went down. I don’t know.”

Carolina hears in his voice that Wash has another idea. She stands in the doorway, waiting for him to realize that she wants him to spit it out.

He doesn’t, the oblivious asshole. Carolina has to ask, “Any other thoughts?”

Wash glances up. “It could be the Triplets.”

“I thought North and South were the only siblings.”

“They weren’t actually related,” Wash explains. “They just all picked the same blue armor with the white stripe, and then they kept pretty close to each other in the rankings, so everyone just kind of lumped them together all the time.”

Carolina nods. “Which ones?”

“Idaho, Iowa, and Ohio,” Wash says.

Carolina nods again, not ready to admit that she still has absolutely no idea who these people are.

* * *

 

The planet is covered in snow and frozen lakes, with no trees in sight. It’s a perfect picture of arctic tranquility, the sort of thing you’d find on a non-denominational pre-printed holiday card sent by an environmental non-profit.

Wash is convinced there’s been a mistake, despite the steadiness of the signal since they came into a reasonable range. Carolina thinks of a squadmate being dragged out here and executed. It’s so remote there doesn’t seem to be any other purpose of a place like this. The environment is tolerable in the right equipment, but probably only for long enough to bury a body. An extended, methodical search of the place would be a miserable death. If Wash’s tracker didn’t say that there were Freelancers alive here, Carolina would expect to only find some mass grave.

They find a bridge connecting the edges of an icy canyon, and it’s the only feature near the coordinates. “Who even wanted to cross?” Wash mumbles. “Only place I’d want to go is off the planet.”

“Do you have coordinates for the individual signals?” Carolina asks, pretending she didn’t hear that as the Pelican slows for landing at the mouth of the canyon. She keeps a safe distance from the bridge in case it has some sort of aint-air defenses.

“Technically, but this isn’t particularly precise,” Wash says. “The signal itself looks like it’s somewhere inside the cliff near that bridge, so I think we should start with checking out those bases at the edge of the bridge.”

Carolina nods. She wants to check them out anyway, in case there are hostiles. She’s not sure anyone could live here, but if they do then they pose a threat.

The Pelican jostles as it lands. Wash marks the coordinates and sends them to Carolina.

As she shuts down the systems, Carolina glances out the windows, staring down a couple hundred yards of canyon towards the bridge, and feels uneasy. “Stay close by me. I don’t want us getting split up. If we do, we’ll rendezvous here as soon as we notice. I want comm silence until the long-range motion sensors can give us a read on those bases.”

Wash is checking the ammo on his gun. Automatically, when Carolina finishes, he says, “Sync.” He almost apologizes as soon as he says it.

Carolina hasn’t expected anyone to say that in years. She suddenly hates the entire concept of seeing another Freelancer. But she still can’t stand the thought of leaving them, dead or dying, least of all in a place like this.

Before leaving, Carolina locks the Pelican with as many security protocols as she can. The whole planet gives Carolina a bad feeling, like an airlock door sliding into place from the wrong side. Nothing’s been showing up on scans--at all, but especially not that could do anything to a Pelican--but it’s Carolina won’t feel remotely safe leaving the Pelican if she doesn’t do something.

Wash notices Carolina lingering, but he doesn’t question it. From the ramp he can feel his suit whirring, sensing the cold and fighting to insulate him with generated heat. He can still feel the cold in the more flexible joints, and it isn’t a pleasant chill.

Carolina locks the bay doors and clutches her rifle. For once, she hopes she doesn’t need it.

* * *

 

There’s the bridge. The suspension system and attached bases provide some cover from enemy fire, but not too much. With the unnecessary height and the snowy backdrop, it’s perfect place for a dramatic firefight. A scattering of bullet holes suggest that someone knew that, which Wash doesn’t consider surprising, given that he knows Freelancers were here.

Near the middle, slightly towards the north, there’s a giant patch of something carbonized, some kind of soot. Like a grenade, but much too big, and no obvious debris to indicate a target. If it hit anything, it must have completely vaporized.

“Plasma?” Carolina asks.

Wash shrugs. “If it is, they only sent one volley.” And it’d be from something bigger than he’s seen.

* * *

 

There’s the south base. It’s got some wide windows, making it indefensible and poorly insulated. Inside, the walls are etched intermittently and clumsily. Some of them have tally marks, some of them have shapes, some of them just say  _ Fuck Project Freelancer _ . Some of them say it many times.

“Some kind of vendetta here,” Wash says, like it isn’t obvious. “Does that sound like anyone in particular?”

Carolina shrugs to the best of her ability without affecting the rifle she has at the ready. “The insurgents. Charon. The UNSC. Everyone.”

“Any of them mad enough to abduct Freelancers?”

“Probably not,” Carolina admits. “But someone is. I’ll bet we’re in the right place.”

The entrance hall gives way to living quarters: mess hall, bathroom, an office, bunks. The beds are stripped and covered in junk--mostly food wrappers, a couple spent fuel cells, and a few beds full of empty liquor bottles.

Two of the bunks are occupied by power armor: blue with white accents. One of them has a yellow stripe on the arm. Wash steps closer to the yellow stripe and says, “Iowa and Idaho.” Neither suit has a helmet. Wash holds his breath and peeks into Iowa’s armor, not sure what he expects but completely expecting something.

It’s empty. Doesn’t even smell. Idaho’s is the same way.

* * *

 

There’s a garden, tucked into the back of the place, far enough from the entrance that it must be buried into the cliff face. Counter-intuitive on any other planet, but this is the only way to insulate from the cold, and the ceiling is covered in lamps. Not all of the bulbs are working, but enough of them are on or flickering to show several layers of browned leaves, covering the impressive patch of deep soil. Wash wonders how they fit it in here.

Carolina takes a couple crunchy steps into the garden, grabs what might have once been a corn stalk, and pulls. It comes away with a tangle of other plants, vines twining around the stalk, and the mess of a root system pulls up several clumps of dirt and an unmistakable femur.

Wash and Carolina stare at each other for a moment. “You didn’t bring any shovels on the Pelican, did you?” Wash asks.

“Nope.”

Wash sighs and gets on his knees. If nothing has pinged on the motion sensor or thermals, there’s nothing to do but dig for answers. “Cleaning armor is going to be a bitch.”

* * *

 

By the time the whole garden is uprooted, there’s an odd assortment of bones to make sense of.

There’s one whole skeleton. It has the longest femur, so they assume it belonged to a man. There’s an entry hole in the top of the skull and an exit wound at the base, nothing else obviously damaged. Given the reason they came here, Wash and Carolina silently and independently call it an execution by bullet.

There’s a torso and neck that seem to be in about the right order. There is no other head. There are two whole arms and two whole legs and they seem like maybe the right size, but most of the bones are broken and those that aren’t show deep grooves that give a hair-raising suggestion at the depth of some slices. Carolina imagines an execution by beheading. Wash suspects dismemberment at some point.

There’s a single foot, and then another. The adjacent legs are cut sharply, missing a ball joint, and there are no other bones found to suggest the rest of the body having ever touched the garden. Wash doesn’t know what to say.

“What has six feet, four arms, and one head?” Carolina asks, recognizing that it could be the setup for a joke. She doesn’t know how to sound like she’s making a joke and she doesn’t know if she should.

They both know enough anatomy to be sure the bones are all human.

* * *

 

There’s a hesitation to leave the south base. It pulls Carolina’s feet closer together than a step would usually take them, makes Wash slow his pace. All speed between them is in their racing thoughts, trying to make sense of the skeletons in the garden.

“What if,” Wash says, “it isn’t three people? What if it’s a different person for each limb?”

“Seems impractical,” Carolina says, voice carrying her uncertainty. Nothing about the dismemberment seems practical.

“Guess we’ll have an idea if there are other body parts on the other side,” Wash suggests.

“Unless it’s just more feet.”

Wash brushes a finger against an etching an he passes. “You think there was some kind of war? That the Freelancers lived on the other side?”

Carolina hesitates, contemplating the scale. “War sounds a bit too big for one bridge.”

“Guess we’ll know if the other side says... I dunno, Fuck UNSC?”

Carolina huffs amusement out her nose. “Suck it, Freelancer,” she says, in the worst impression anyone has ever made of Sarge. But Wash recognizes the phrase, knows that the Reds and Blues have both taken it up, and stops in his tracks.

“You don’t think...”

“What?” Carolina asks. She stops ahead of Wash, facing him.

“Could this have been a sim trooper base?” Wash asks. “Maybe they just had a training exercise with the other side? They weren’t particularly good soldiers, if any Freelancers could get killed by some random sim troopers it’s probably them.”

“Doesn’t explain why nobody’s here,” Carolina says. “And we’re looking for people who have only been missing since Chorus.”

“Idaho, Iowa, and Ohio have been missing since before the AI implants started,” Wash says.

“What?”

“Yeah, not long before. Nobody really talked about it,” Wash explains, “but the files said they were sent on a mission in this quadrant and weren’t heard from again.” His heart sinks suddenly. What if these are unrelated? It was so long before...

“If this is where the first missing Freelancers wound up, there must at least be clues about what happened to the others,” Carolina says. Something about the logic doesn’t add up to her, but it doesn’t matter. “We’re here anyway.”

Wash nods, encouraged. “Come on. Let’s check out that other base, see if they have any computers.”

* * *

 

There’s the north base. The entrance looks like an empty garage, simple tools scattered on the ground--wrenches, a hammer, various containers sorting various nuts and bolts. Almost everything more sophisticated looks like a horrible amalgam of gun parts, alien alloy, and duct tape. Wash picks up some misshapen metal chunk with a nozzle, and manages to identify it as a blowtorch just before he can blast his face off.

This base has etchings in it, too. One wall is dedicated to the biggest one yet. The letters have been worn in several times, traced in a couple layers of soot, grease, and what Wash sincerely hopes isn’t blood, the first word traced in bullet holes, and the whole thing scratched in again. Carolina thinks it looks like a couple hundred repetitions layered over each other, the scraps of metal underneath suggesting that the words would be deeper if they had a proper tool. Some words have been carved more than others, but someone definitely wanted to emphasize the entire concept at once:

_ Fuck Charon and Freelancer _

“You know what?” Wash tells Carolina. “I have no idea what the fuck happened here.”

* * *

 

There’s the same layout, perfectly symmetrical, but this half has obviously been lived in more. There are at least twice as many etchings on the walls, and the majority declaim Charon, but there’s no shortage of animosity for Freelancer. The pantry isn’t quite empty, littered with wrappers of shelf-stable snacks, stocked with the kind of shitty pre-packaged meals that could make even Grif lose his appetite. There are two dry towels hanging in the bathroom. In the sleeping quarters, two of the bunks have been pushed together, and both of them have sheets.

It’s hard to navigate the room because the floor is littered with guns and pieces of power armor: two shades of gray and one shade of red. It looks like parts from two or three suits, all in different states of disrepair.

“These don’t look particularly like any Freelancer,” Wash says, but he’s doubtful. Paint jobs are easy, and nobody could remember every model of every part of armor.

Carolina shakes her head. “Charon, standard-issue for security personnel.” She’s killed people wearing it, in the process of finding out who was stealing Freelancer equipment. Made it seem all the more obvious when Epsilon pinned it down to them.

She nods to the corner, where there’s a more complete suit. It’s blue, lighter than Iowa and Idaho. “That one?” she asks.

“Ohio,” Wash says, certain.

All of the armor is completely empty. No amount of searching finds a helmet for any suit.

Carolina finds a data pad on a bed. The battery is empty, but it’s something to charge in the Pelican, and if it contains even one surveillance video then it’s probably got more answers than they’ve found so far.

Wash finds a sniper rifle on the floor. “If there’s anyone here, they’ll probably respond to hearing this go off.”

* * *

 

There is no response to Wash or Carolina, not from either of the bases, not when they open the comm on all channels or fire a rifle into the wall or flicker every control they can find in the northern base. Nothing suggests that any Freelancer was here other than the armor. Someone here obviously had feelings on the project, but Carolina points out that anyone who hates it might just be collecting trophies.

“Seems like an odd way to display them,” Wash says. He imagines a room with displays of full armor sets. Maybe kept on artistically posed mannequins. It’s oddly comforting, compared to the haphazard disposal he’s seen here.

They come back to the entrance and stare at the bridge, at the black stain, the size of a modest vehicle.

“There’s no ship,” Carolina says. “No way they could go anywhere from here. How did they even get here?”

“Maybe they took the only one? Maybe they just left and didn’t bother to pack their armor.” It doesn't particularly make sense and it still means there’s no lead on the missing Freelancers, much less Church.

Carolina shakes her head. “We should have a better idea once the data pad is charged. Since we got the power on, we might find a local server, and if we do then there’s probably  _ something  _ useful on that.” She thinks there must be, but she can’t be hopeful given what they’ve found so far. “Do you want me to scout the area while it charges, or do you want to give me the sniper rifle so I can cover you?”

Wash doesn’t particularly want to be out in the snow, but he’s never been as good a shot as Carolina. He hands her the sniper rifle. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.” He doesn’t think he will.

The sniper rifle scope doesn’t help Carolina see any spies or scouts on the other end of the canyon. All it does is show the snowflakes in a higher resolution, and as Wash descends the path to the bottom of the canyon, she can tell the difference between a two-inch slip on the icy slope and a vague hand gesture to dismiss a thought.

She’s gotten to know Wash so well. It occurs to Carolina that she never knew any of the Freelancers during the project, not as well as she knows Wash now. Probably doesn’t hurt that Wash was there too, that they have been fighting together longer than anyone else in Carolina’s life. In the past few months, though, there’s been so little combat. Carolina’s seen a new side of Wash and he’s seen a new side of her. She could recognize him in someone else’s armor, she thinks, and she knows that the trial on Chorus would focus on a different death if it happened today.

By contrast, Carolina doesn’t even remember Iowa, Idaho, or Ohio. She’s not sure she’s seen their names on a single Freelancer roster and she doesn’t remember seeing that armor anywhere before now. The only familiarity she has is a passing knowledge that they are locations in a country on Earth, and that it stood to reason that there were Freelancers with those names.

They weren’t in Carolina’s trial on Chorus. How could they be if she didn’t know them? She would be relieved if it meant that she had to watch fewer people die, but she knows, intimately, the number of bodies at the end.

Someone was invented to die in their place. Carolina had screamed for bodies she didn’t even know. How many other Freelancers had she never even bothered knowing? She felt like they had been family, the only good thing her father could leave for her. And she had taken them for granted, assumed she could mourn for them when she didn’t even know what they looked like.

“Carolina,” Wash says, breaking into her thoughts over the comm. “You’ve got to see this.”

She knows he’s directly below the bridge, where she can’t see. She knows it could be a setup, someone with a threat and an order not to tell his partner. Wariness drips from her voice. “What is it?”

Wash understands her apprehension and sends her a video feed. He sees a piece of metal in the unbroken white of the snow, clears it with his hands to reveal the butt of a rifle, stuck upright into something under the snow.

Carolina recognizes a rudimentary grave. “I’ll be right there.”

* * *

 

There are bodies, frozen into blocks of ice like specimens in resin.

Mike is the first. “Iowa,” Wash says, remembering from the files he looked at on the way there. Iowa is buried with his helmet--or Idaho’s, Wash thinks, not immediately recalling how he could tell them apart--laid beside his head, and a lowball glass of something wheat-colored and frozen around clear ice. In his hands are a set of playing cards with dragons on them. One hand looks like it was dyed blue. He wears a sweatshirt with his insignia on them, and pajama pants pinned up just below the knee. In place of his shins, there is a pair of dice.

Carolina looks up at Wash. “You don’t think his legs were in the garden, do you?”

“There were plenty of legs to go around,” Wash says flatly.

They find Idaho’s helmet next, right next to Iowa. It’s encircled by a couple items: leaves, a seed packet, dice, spent casings, bottlecaps. There is no body.

Carolina keeps checking along the line while Wash inches away from the helmet, unnerved, to check the other side.

Wash finds Darryl and has no idea who that is. He thinks there’s a janitor associated with Freelancer, after he finds the name etched onto the rifle, but Carolina says that the dark gray helmet on his left shoulder is Charon standard-issue. Darryl is buried with a bottle of something blue by his head and a snack wrapper in his hand, a crown of paper flowers on his head. He’s wearing a dress uniform of some kind.

Beyond Darryl is Terrill’s head. It takes a moment to register that it’s just the head: someone laid out a set of fatigues, laid out as if to fit a silhouette at a crime scene.

“Decapitated,” Wash says uneasily. “How do you think that happened?”

Carolina thinks she sees a dent in the forehead, but she isn’t sure enough to point it out. “Could have been post-mortem,” she says, letting doubt into her voice so she doesn’t have to explain. It doesn’t particularly put Wash at ease.

Terrill has a rolled blanket under his head, a helmet identical to Darryl’s on his left, and a highball glass on his right, filled to the brim with something off-white. Across the chest of the empty shirt, connecting the cuffs, is a sheet of white paper. It looks like a letter, but between the ink dissolving into the water before the grave froze and the distance down, it can’t be read. Carolina’s pretty sure it has the Charon logo in the letterhead.

Wash doesn’t even want to look at anything else they find. The whole thing has him on edge, feeling watched. Maybe by a ghost, but his training tells him to be worried about whoever did this. If all the bodies are buried, someone had to have survived, somehow.

So Wash is keeping lookout, patrolling the area, when Carolina uncovers the last one.

Her cheeks are sunken with hunger. She wears a dress uniform which makes her body look disproportionately large, the fabric too stiff to cling to her form, sized for a woman at a healthy weight. There is a white sheet draped on her shoulders, pinned in place with a Freelancer insignia. There is a storage chip in her hands, and four red thumbtacks on a string tied to it. Over one shoulder she has an unopened bottle of rum, and over the other she has a light blue helmet with a white stripe.

“Found Ohio,” Carolina says.

“Jesus,” Wash murmurs. Three Freelancer signals and three dead Freelancers--the whole thing was a waste of time, fuel, and adrenaline. He hesitates, unsure if he wants the closure of seeing Ohio if she’s going to just be a pile of severed arms or something. “Cause of death?” he asks warily.

“Probably starvation.”

Wash approaches cautiously, and when he looks down at the face he tilts his head. “That’s not Ohio,” he says, confused.

“She might look different from the weight loss,” Carolina suggests.

Wash shakes his head. “Malnutrition doesn’t change someone’s race.”

Carolina brushes ice off of the rifle and reads the name etched into the stock. “This is Sherry,” she says. “Is there any Sherry associated with Freelancer?”

Wash thinks for a moment before shaking his head. “Maybe, but definitely not as a soldier. And that’s definitely Ohio's helmet... Do you think this was some kind of imposter?” Wash remembers finding CT’s helmet on the desert, star systems away from where she was reported to have died, but shakes his head again. “That doesn't make sense. Ohio’s name was Vera, nobody faking a specific identity would change the name.”

Carolina shuffles along the line, back and forth a couple of times. She doesn't find any other patches of ice.

* * *

There are canisters of ammunition under the feet of each body, or where the feet would be. The rifle headstones give the name, etched into the stock. Ezra and Mike are followed by  _ Fuck Freelancer _ . Darryl, Terrill, and Sherry are followed by _ Fuck Charon _ .

“Why did these guys say that so much?” Wash asks over the comm, like Carolina will know. “I mean, I'm not gonna disagree, but...”

Carolina shrugs, heading back to the Pelican. “Disgrace for the enemy?” She doesn't understand why anyone would go through the trouble of the funeral rites just to do that.

Wash is almost back on the bridge when he says, as the thought hits him, “Everyone thought that the Triplets were cut from the program. Maybe calling it a mission was a cover-up, and they were bitter about being rejected.”

“And Charon?”

Wash shakes his head. “Dunno. Maybe the same. Maybe not.”

Carolina hums, unconvinced. “If there were Freelancers associating with Charon,” she says, “do you think they might have been involved with the insurgents?”

“Not sure why insurgents would have such a low opinion of Charon,” Wash says. “Unless these guys all died after Chorus? How long have they been dead, anyway?”

Now it's Carolina shaking her head. “I wouldn't know.” It’s probably impossible to know, with all the ice.

* * *

 

There are files, thank god, and there are video logs organized by who recorded them, thank fuck. Wash watches the latest file in Ohio’s folder while Carolina tries to find any other kind of signal or detector in the Pelican.

He doesn’t have to get through the whole video to recognize a suicide note. He downloads the rest of the files on the base server and tells Carolina that they have everything they can get from here.

“Seems like there were only six people here. The bodies and Ohio,” Wash says from the doorway to the cockpit as the Pelican ascends steadily through the atmosphere.

“Anything about where Ohio wound up?”

Wash sighs. “Self-inflicted gunshot. Or that was the plan. Sounded like she meant to die next to the graves, but... I mean, nobody would have been able to set up a grave, we probably walked right over her and didn’t know.”

“You sure she’s not the one in the garden?” Carolina asks.

“Not sure how she’d get buried,” Wash answers. “We’ve got plenty of other logs to go through, if you want to find out exactly how everyone died, or just be sure that they did.”

Carolina remembers the assortment of bones in the garden and knows she doesn't particularly want insight into the psychology behind anything on that planet. And the way the bodies add up, she doesn’t need that confirmation. “You think there’s anything on the other missing Freelancers?”

Wash shakes his head. “The time stamp is a couple years ago, and she was there on orders, with the others.”

“What the hell were they doing there in the first place?” Carolina wonders aloud. “Did your files say what the mission was about? Didn’t seem like there was anything worth doing.”

“Well, the Freelancer files don't say,” Wash says, treading carefully. “How do you feel about Project Freelancer lately?”

“Not as highly as I used to,” Carolina answers, neutral. There are certainly aspects that she hates, but some of the criticisms are still a little too close. She inhales silently. “Tell me.”

Wash sighs, sitting in the copilot seat. “Ohio says they were given a mission that involved being dropped off on that planet with no objective, no supplies, and no plan for evac. She figured they were set up to die.”

Carolina’s grip tightens on the control column. She doesn’t think highly of Project Freelancer anymore, but they always had a reason, or at least an excuse. She grasps for one now. “You think the Charon insurgents met her there?”

Wash shakes his head. “Ohio thought the Charon people were just given the same sort of assignment. Ordered to defend a base that nobody visited, in a hostile environment. Could have been a cover, for all I know, but...”

It wouldn’t make sense. Wash doesn’t have to say that for Carolina to know it.

There’s an incidental moment of silence, only marked by the hum of engines and the grind of air friction against the windshield. Carolina thinks about how much she didn’t know these Freelancers--the Triplets, Wash called them. Wash thinks about how much he knows about them, how many memories are gone without them.

Wash asks, “Did you ever play Five Things?”

“No,” Carolina says. “I don’t play games.” She isn’t as proud of it as she used to be.

“It’s barely even a game. But pretty much everyone played it sometimes,” Wash explained. “The Triplets came up with it. Or started playing it so much that we all picked it up, even if nobody really wanted to associate with them.”

“Why didn’t people talk to them?” Carolina asks, ready to hear evidence for some insurgent link.

Wash shrugs. “They just... weren’t good soldiers. Bad shots, bad luck with vehicles, bad reactions to stress. Sometimes I wonder how they even got into the program. You know how there were a couple of us stuck in pools on the leaderboard? You go up or down a slot or two, but never really further than that?”

“I have an idea,” Carolina says, a little too smug.

“Yeah, whatever.” Wash could definitely say something about work-life balance here. He doesn’t. “You were stuck at the top in a pool with Tex. They were stuck at the bottom in a pool with each other.”

“... That’s it?”

“I mean, as far as I know,” Wash says. “I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if they accidentally did something to piss someone off. Iowa had a reputation for wrecking vehicles. He could make Jensen look like a taxi driver.”

Carolina is about to make a comment about property damage, but it falls devastatingly short of insurrection. She contains her thoughts in a frown, realizing that she’s grasping for excuses for Project Freelancer. Like she still works for them. Like she’s responsible for the project, inheriting a responsibility to traumatize in the name of advancement.

She wonders what kept these Triplets from being designated as simulation troopers, if they were so bad. She wonders if she only wants to know it so she can justify something. When she can’t be sure, Carolina decides she isn’t ready to know that.

But if she doesn’t know... then there’s no reason to expect that her sim troopers couldn’t have been the ones brought into Freelancer, carried through training on some fluke or another and culled later. These are people Carolina considers family now, and if one assessment had gone a little differently, it could have been their bodies she’d find in the ice, executed in the cold and torn apart for fertilizer. It could have been Tucker’s body, or Caboose’s, and she wouldn’t even have cared.

It has never been so important to Carolina that she not follow her father. She can’t be so ready to find excuses after the fact. She has to learn how to make the right decision in the first place.

The air pressure fades to nothing, the windshield runs out of atmosphere to compress, and now it’s only the soft hum of the engine. Wash is looking for the coordinates for the next jump, realizing that Carolina needs to know where to go next.

Carolina realizes she’s been holding her breath. She inhales deeply, sighs it out, and figures it’s better late than never. “So,” she asks, “how do you play Five Things?”


End file.
